Privacy, Security, and Public Information after September 11

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With the growth of the World Wide Web and the signing of the Electronic Freedom of Information Act Amendments in the mid-1990s, technology promised empowerment and freedom. The web held the potential to create an informed and engaged citizenry by providing the American voter access to a virtually unlimited world of data.

After the September 11 attacks, however, the accessibility of computer networks has come to be viewed as a vulnerability instead of an asset. The freedom offered by technology has increasingly been replaced with secrecy in the name of security. But this equation of secrecy with security threatens not only our liberty but our safety, as an ill-informed public has little faith in its leadership and is poorly equipped to evaluate its vulnerabilities.

A Little Knowledge describes how the current administration’s campaign for unprecedented secrecy has affected the functioning of our democracy and recommends six critical tenets for framing a new, more open national policy on technology and public information. The book argues that citizens must assert the value of openness in formulating new and more productive approaches toward reconciling the imperatives of security and freedom.

Book Details

159 Pages

June 1, 2004

Paperback ISBN:
9780870784873

About the Authors

John Podesta

John Podesta served as chair of Hillary for America. He is the former chair of the Washington, D.C.-based think tank Center for American Progress and the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Prior to founding the center in 2003, he served as White House chief of staff to President Bill Clinton.

Peter M. Shane

Peter M. Shane is the Joseph S. Platt-Porter, Wright, Morris, and Arthur Professor of Law at the Ohio State University and founding director of the Institute for the Study of Information Technology and Society at the H. J. Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management, Carnegie Mellon University.